New from Cambridge University Press!

Sociolinguistics from the Periphery "presents a fascinating book about change: shifting political, economic and cultural conditions; ephemeral, sometimes even seasonal, multilingualism; and altered imaginaries for minority and indigenous languages and their users."

The book summarizes the methods developed for the multilingual''Dictionary of European Anglicisms'' (DEA) (Görlach 2001), which isbacked up by two companion volumes: the ''Annotated Bibliography ofEuropean Anglicisms'' (Görlach 2002) and ''English in Europe''(Görlach 2002). It presents the extent of the lexical impact ofEnglish loanwords on individual European languages and cultures. Thebook is a collection of conference papers and contributions tojournals and festschriften written by M. Görlach. The author'sintention was not only to bring the scattered contributions togetherand bring the evidence up-to-date, but also ''to provide a survey inwhich the interrelationship of the various methodological aspects andconsiderations relating to the topic were made explicit''. To a largeextent, repetition was successfully avoided as far as this wascompatible with the aim of retaining as many clues to the history ofthe project as possible.

OVERVIEW

Initially, a general outline of the main topics is given, some ofwhich are dealt with in more detail in the chapters thatfollow. Rather than present the book chapter by chapter, I will try tooutline the main issues. Along with presenting the methodologicalprinciples underlying the DEA, a survey of the existing research inthe field is given, together with an overview of the earlierdictionaries of anglicisms. As a rule, they are limited to Englishloanwords in national languages, which largely determines their basicapproach. As opposed to the traditional historical etymologicalapproach, the author stresses the need for a dictionary recording theactual usage of anglicisms in various European languages. It isrightly pointed out that usage should be central to any synchronicstudy intended to capture the fleeting presence of English lexis inthe various languages sharing in the borrowing process.

The major European languages included in the DEA come from the mainlanguage families: Romance (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian)Germanic (German, Dutch, Norwegian, Icelandic), and Slavonic (Russian,Polish, Croatian, Bulgarian) with Finno-Ugric (Finnish, Hungarian) andtwo unrelated languages added (Albanian, Modern Greek). The schemeincludes languages from the East and West, which permits conclusionsabout the degree to which the anglicization depends on linguisticstructure and exposure to the English language and culturaltraditions. It also permits contrasts of degrees of purismvs. permissiveness and insights into the mediating influences ofFrench and German.

The raw data were collected from dictionaries, monographs and studiesdevoted to anglicisms, newspapers, radio, television and specializedjournals. The collected items were then tested on educated users ofindividual languages as informants, mainly in the usage statements inthe form of self-reports, with judgments of acceptability, frequencyand style. The criteria of inclusion follow from the basic definitionof anglicism as a word which is recognizably English in its form(spelling, pronunciation, morphology) in at least one language. Thisexcludes words that have been so fully adapted that their Englishorigin is no longer apparent to the general user. In addition, itemsof neo-classical (Latin/Greek) character whose English provenance isimpossible to determine, as well as many words from other languagestransmitted through English, do not qualify for inclusion. Code-switches, quotation words used for a certain stylistic effect andplayful uses are not included. Items of a highly technical characterand limited currency are excluded, as well as elements of foreign(Anglophone) cultures, archaisms and product names.

The earliest forms of loanwords are not taken into considerationbecause they are often identical for several Germanic languages, andit is sometimes impossible to decide which language borrowed fromwhich. The playful uses from journalese and advertising are notincluded since ''they were not meant to be introduced as permanentloanwords''. This position is slightly questionable, since it is oftenimpossible to predict whether some of this ''fleeting vocabulary'' isgoing to be dropped or become more firmly integrated. The positiontaken with respect to neo-classical vocabulary was that it should beleft to another dictionary, and that entries can be admitted only forthose words that carry some Englishness in their form in at least oneof the languages sampled. In most cases, words from exotic languageshave not been included since in languages such as Spanish, Portuguese,French and Dutch they were often borrowed directly, without theEnglish mediation. Words designating items in a foreign culture arenot taken as loanwords unless they come to refer to objects in thereceiving culture. In my view, loanwords of this type provide commonexamples of cultural borrowing, which should make them candidates forinclusion. In dealing with technical terms, it is difficult to decidewhich terms to include, especially in fields such as sports orcomputer technology since the scope of their usage can expand veryquickly. As a rule, archaisms are excluded; however, items obsolete inone language, but with living reflexes in another have beenrecorded. Proper names are excluded unless they are used as genericterms. On the other hand, English words disguised through mediationqualify for inclusion, as well as derivatives and compounds made upfrom elements of English provenance, along with pseudo-English wordsand meanings. Calques in individual languages are mentioned if thereis an entry for the English word because it exists in other Europeanlanguages.

The individual factors which can affect the integration of anglicismsinclude different phonological and morphological structures of theindividual languages, the functional status of English in a speechcommunity involving the frequency of language contacts and thespecific domains affected by it, the official encouragement orstigmatisation of anglicisms, and the functional range of the receptorlanguage. Although the integration of anglicisms is a long-termexpectation, the high prestige of the donor language can slow downaccommodation, or block it entirely. Due to the frequency and range ofuses and the degree of speakers' competence in English, all thelanguages concerned may end up having a layer of unintegrated Englishwords.

Anglicisms can become integrated on the levels of spelling,pronunciation, morphology, meaning, and style. For languages withdifferent alphabetical systems, transliteration is usually employed.Where Latin alphabet is used for the national language, there may bethree chronological stages. In the first stage, the English spellingis retained which may trigger 'spelling' pronunciations. The secondstage may be to integrate the word graphemically, while the thirdstage is marked by adoption without graphemic accommodation due toextended proficiency in English. Although there is a great variabilityin the pronunciation of loanwords in which age, sex, education andregional provenance may play a role, the trend towards closerapproximation to English pronunciation is increasing in all Europeanlanguages. Morphological adaptation commonly involves the allocationof gender and plural forms. Due to a frequent conflict between naturalgender, morphological structure and semantic analogy, the outcome ofthe individual gender allocation is often impossible topredict. Adjectives are often minimally inflected or not at all, andas a consequence they are sometimes used in the predicative positiononly. Comparison is easy for languages using analytic methods butproblematic for those which employ inflexions. The integration ofverbs tends to be easier for most languages. The base form of theEnglish verb is well defined, and the set of national inflexions iseasily added. Since many modern anglicisms are compounds, theirintegration largely depends on the structure of the receptorlanguage. In any case, compounds imitating the English pattern appearto be on the increase. Although most borrowings are lexical items,some frequent suffixes, such as -er and - ing, are often borrowed aswell.

On the semantic level, one of the greatest problems is to describe howfar meanings of anglicisms agree with those recorded for the Englishsource, and amongst each other in the respective receptor languages.Meaning changes in the borrowing process even in the case of monosemicitems; at best, denotation can be held constant. Sometimes severalmeanings are borrowed successively. Thus, loanwords in differentlanguages borrowed from the same etymon cannot be fully equated. Inaddition, changes of meaning, or archaic senses preserved in loanwordscan give important clues to the paths by which words spread from onelanguage to another. Regarding style, loanwords can become part of thecore vocabulary, or remain restricted in various ways. The followingstylistic categories are distinguished: formal/informal,new/obsolescent or archaic, euphemistic/ facetious/fashionable;technical, and evaluative (referring to items stigmatised by thespeech community or even banned by legislative measures).

The DEA lexical entries are structured in the following way: 1) thelemma in its English form, 2) part of speech label, 3) meanings in alllanguages included, 4) the major facts of the word's history and itsspread across Europe; 5) language sigil, 6) spelling, if differentfrom English, 7) pronunciation, 8)gender, 9) pluralization, 10) dateof acceptance, 11) way of transmission (mediating language), 12)number of the meaning referring to the English source, 13) degree ofacceptability/currency, style markers and domains, 14)calques,indicating the relative frequency of the alternative items, andl5)non- lemmatized language-specific derivatives.

In the end, valuable suggestions are given regarding new directions inthe field of multilingual lexicography where similar methodology couldbe applied. To give a more comprehensive picture of lexical borrowingin European languages, the DEA should be complemented by at leastthree similar dictionaries: for neo-Latin/Greek coinages, for French,and for German. In this way a comprehensive history of culturalcontacts in post-Renaissance Europe could be presented based on thelexical evidence. Neo-classical vocabulary is part of the medievaltradition of Europe. A second wave of neo-classical neologisms camewith the development of modern science from the 18th centuryonward. French has dominated certain fields of literature, philosophy,diplomacy, science, the fine arts, fashion, and cookery from theMiddle Ages onwards. Moreover, it was extensively spoken by the upperclasses in many European countries in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The international impact of German, on the other hand, is largelyhistorical, and it is geographically restricted mainly to Northern andEastern Europe. German loanwords were adopted in several layers. Inthe first phase, words were borrowed from German-speaking settler ortrading communities, often from spoken discourse, and affecting termsof daily life. This early layer affected individual European languagesin Scandinavia and in Eastern Europe in different ways. Thousands ofgermanisms in neighbouring languages provide a striking contrast tothe few dozen widespread cultural borrowings of the modern age fromGerman in English, French or Italian. Another layer, which extendswell into the 19th century relates to technical terms introduced byartisans. Regions under Prussian and Austrian domination had aconsiderable number of German administrative terms. The dominance ofGerman university education and scholarly learning has provided alarge number of scientific terms; they tend to be, however, fromneo-classical roots. Many of these words have become obsolete, or havebeen replaced by native equivalents or new borrowings, mainly fromEnglish. French had a historical function and geographicaldistribution similar to that of English today, while a large number ofGerman loanwords in Eastern Europe are close-contact phenomena,whether the loanwords have remained dialectal or not. On the otherhand, Low and High German have contributed to the formation of newstandard languages in Scandinavia. Pilot studies undertaken to attestthe presence of German and French loanwords in European languagesconfirm that the function of French as a European lingua franca before1900 parallels the role of English today. By contrast, the impact ofGerman was so different in individual periods, regions andsociohistorical contexts that research should concentrate primarily onthe contribution to individual receptor languages. In the end,statistical data obtained from the CD-ROM version are given, whichcould provide a stimulus for further research into possiblequantifications that could be made on the basis of DEA.

The book contains a List of figures, a List of abbreviations, anAppendix with translations of illustrative texts, References, andIndexes (Index of names and Selective word index).

CRITICAL EVALUATION

This book is a fascinating account of principles and methodsunderlying the ambitious and complex project which has resulted in theDictionary of European Anglicisms. To be sure, the main principleshave been expounded in the dictionary itself, but the space awarded toexpository introductions in dictionaries is always limited. This bookgives full justice to the scope and complexities of this highlysuccessful project, and I would warmly recommend it to readers who arealready familiar with the DEA and its companion volumes, as well as toeveryone who is interested in (multilingual) lexicography, contactlinguistics, and the impact of English on European languages.

REFERENCES

Görlach, Manfred (ed) A Dictionary of European Anglicisms: A UsageDictionary of Anglicisms in Sixteen European languages, OxfordUniversity Press, 2001.

Görlach, Manfred (ed), English in Europe, Oxford University Press,2002.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Lelija Socanac is a researcher at the Linguistic Research Institute, Zagreb, Croatia. She is currently directing the project "Croatian in Contact with European Languages". Her research interests include contact linguistics, sociolinguistics and lexicography.